Customer Reviews

Techno Gears Marble Mania Extreme 2.0

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The twin boys from next door loved Discovery Toys Marble Works, but it was starting to loose their interest. Thought I would "upgrade" to what looks like a very cool toy, adding gears and a "power lifter" to the "marble experience" and so i bought "Marble Mania"

It comes with about 25 different types of "parts" that all friction fit together. The manual is okay, but could really use a bigger format to make reading / reference easier. It took me about 5 very frustrating hours to assemble this monster. Hint: group the similar parts together and make sure you have the right piece...because if you don't you will have to take it all apart and start over. Also, the manual only illustrates the "pictured" construct...some alternatives that require different levels of understanding and demonstration of gear ratios and other "capabilities" would really enhance the learning "possibilities / fun".

Anyway, the base does not completely interlock and will only stay together if mounted on a tabletop or hard surface. This makes moving the toy very problematic. Hint: get a piece of wood plank and cut to size to provide a permanent base for the toy. This is not something you assemble, take apart and put away...just too complicated and time consuming to re-assemble.

The friction fit allows for quite a bit of "play" in the alignment of the various gears and slides and must be constantly adjusted to keep the gears and marbles running as planned. The unit only comes with 3 marbles...for $50, they could provide a bag full.

Still, the motorized "power lifter" is cool (if very slow) and the marble runs are pretty interesting, once you get the alignment of the supporting framework perfect. It held the boys interest for about 20 minutes...pretty long for these two. They are too little to experiment with alternative configurations which would probably be a lot of fun for a pre-teen.

I think this toy would be excellent if your child has the patience, skills and interest in creative problem solving required to assemble the structure. Children who could go beyond the pictured construct and build "experimental models" with these parts would have a lot of possibilities to explore.

Don't plan on a young child building this on their own or being able to use it unsupervised.

I bought this for my son when he was 4 years old because he absolutely loves marble runs (not just marbles), especially the complicated ones created at children's science centers. We chose to put together the display run and yes, it took quite a while to do as it used almost every part. (It took us 3 hours) You can just as easily construct a smaller run from the many pieces. We constructed it on a piece of wood so that we can move it around the house easily. My children ages 5 & 3 now, absolutely love this toy. The pieces move easily, however my son can now fix anything loose. Keep in mind, THE TOY IS RECOMMENDED FOR KIDS 6 AND OVER. If you don't want to help your kids with the toy, don't buy it until they are old enough to really work with it.

It is great for kids mechanically inclined because the kids can now take it apart and contstruct very simply to quite complicated marble runs. Think of it as a big box of Lego. If you need to use every piece, it will take a while to construct and be complicated. However, you can construct smaller runs and have endless possibilities.

I do not recommend this toy. Parts broke before we got the thing assembled-which by the way with children "helping" took two hours. Once assembled the kids had a great time until it started falling apart. Not a toy to put up and then store easily; more than likely you will put it up once and then never bring it out again.

I plan on returning it and trying again with another product.

When I saw this "award winning" toy on sale, I decided to buy it for my son who absolutely loves marble tracks and gears, and all things technical. My son was very excited by it but I am disappointed. I thought it would be more flexible in allowing your own creations but it has so many specialized pieces and different connectors that it is quite hard to create your own.

It is very time consuming to build the pictured set-up. The instructions for it (i.e. just the one creation) are 45 pages long! It is easy to go wrong due to some of the different building blocks looking so similar. Perhaps they should have been color coded. Once put together it falls apart easily. Admittedly my son is not the recommended 8 years.

The plastic pieces are of poor quality and do not fit together nicely like Lego does. Several of the little white pieces that attach the cog wheels snapped on Day 1. Later the spiral piece (marble lift) snapped which pretty much renders the toy useless.

This took me hours to put together and continuously fell apart every time my son tried to use. It was very frustrating.

I bought this for my son because he loves marbles. It took my husband hours to put together and then it kept falling apart. It had to be readjusted constantly to keep the marbles running smoothly. Also, it states in the manual that we can go to the website to get more construction ideas but the website as been down for months! Where is the accountability to customers when we cannot even contact the makers of this toy?
For the price of this toy, I wish I had gotten something different; something more user friendly.

We have a lot of experience with marble runs in our household. For a plastic run, this is very sturdy! I was really surprised that people complain it's not. The instructions are excellent and offer pictures for each level of construction, both for the section you're building, as well as what the section looks like assembled on the base. The parts bags are labeled with the contents, and each part is labeled with the part number. The box does read 8+, so I wouldn't go by Amazon's recommended age. As it turns out, this was for my 4-year-old marble run maniac, so I put it together. It took 2 hours while constantly relocating my parts-eating 10-month-old throughout the process(the manual states 3-4 hours and probably would take that long if you are a kid or fail to refer to the part numbers when building). That said, I do think it does not lend itself to creating original marble runs due to the number of small parts. While my son loves this, it's not nearly as versatile as the Quercetti models available--but our Quercetti runs fall apart much more easily.

Raising two young engineers, we snapped this up when we found it on sale. Now that we've made it, I wish we hadn't.

My boys are already all over complicated marble systems like Quadrilla Marble Railway, Twist and Rail, so I wasn't very fazed by the age requirements, however this stuff was a huge disappointment.

The first issue we had was that the manufacture quality is poor, made with flimsy light weight plastic casting, only slightly better than what I might expect from a kids-meal toy. One of the side effect of this is that even when correctly assembled, they fit loosely, and not interlock very firmly. This leads to instability in the structure which makes the upper levels extra challenging.

The second point is the piece design. Where Lego will use color to differentiate similar pieces, these have all the supports the same color, and all the connectors the same color. So in order to find the piece size required you have to sort through the pieces reading small numbers in the plastic.

These two issue combine to make these really difficult to build. In our case it took and hour and half of dedicated parent time for the parent to build, and we had hard time finding jobs that were do-able so the kids could help. Not what we had in mind.

The final point that I have against this, is that despite the fact that the auger is cool, the gears in the package are basically unused in the one design they provide. Of the dozen or so gears included all but about 3 are either riders (spinning but not driving anything) or not even spinning at all.

In short we are sorry that we even purchased these, since it was neither educational, nor particularly fun for the boys, and this is a missed opportunity to find one of the better quality competitors.

This toy cannot be constructed intuitively. One must painstakingly follow the directions to get a working marble run. It took me hours to assemble and I'm good at these sorts of things. The green vertical pieces are easy to mix up which means you have to take it all apart if you get one piece in the wrong place because it is 1/4" shorter than another. Do not attempt to put together with any "help" from your child (and what is the point, then?). Although the description says ages 6 and up, I'm pretty sure the box has it labeled as 8 and up. We returned it and found better uses for our money.

We are starting quite a collection of these marble sets, and are now the proud owners of the Extreme 2.0, what I love most, as a parent, is how these sets have practically endless possibilities, especially with multiples, my son just loves building them! The fun now isn't just following the directions, its putting them together in his own way, and if that doesn't work, he really stops to think what could be the problem. I adore watching my boys work with my husband as they put their heads together to figure out and test their new designs!

A no-brainer when it comes to purchasing! Our family can't get enough!